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Friday, 21 November 2014

Glowing Worms of Someone's or Something's Death

Image: Jeff Cremer

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is a train heading straight for you.

Other times it's a meat-eating worm! Though that's admittedly more rare.
And you can relax because this predatory, glowing worm is barely more than 1 centimetre (half an inch) long. It's highly unlikely that there'll be enough of them to successfully eat a person alive. Highly unlikely.

They were first discovered a few years ago when wildlife photographer Jeff Cremer decided to take a walk around the Peruvian Amazon in the dead of night. Clearly, this was a man who knew how unlikely it was for anything in the Peruvian darkness to jump out from the bushes and eat him alive.

Image: Jeff Cremer

Did I say "this was a man"? I meant "is". He's doing just fine.

As he walked, he spotted some beads of unearthly light glowing in a wall of dirt. Upon closer inspection, these beads of light turned out to be small, bioluminescent worm-things poking their heads out of burrows and brandishing their vicious mandibles.

They're thought to be the larvae of beetles, more specifically, Click Beetles. A couple hundred Click Beetles bioluminesce as adults and some don't wait that long, their larvae are child geniuses who glow from an early age. Glowing larvae have been seen poking their heads out of termite mounds (which is incredibly cool!), but never out of a simple wall of dirt.

To test whether this glow-worm was really a predator the entomologists got an ant and waved it in front of the worm's open mandibles. Sure enough, the glow-worm snapped at a leg and attempted to pull the ant down into its burrow.

Thus, what we have is a kind of miniature, terrestrial, glow-in-the-dark Bobbit Worm who attracts prey by means of eerie, green light. As it turns out, the light attracts not only ants and whatever other small prey, but also a wildlife photographer and three entomologists. I'm sure they'll remember that for future use.